Introducing Classic Horror Fiction Books

Hello. My name is Gregory Fisher but most people know me better as the Undead Rat. I have a website dedicated to giving you the best selection of horror fiction books anywhere.

How Classic Horror Fiction Books Began

Recently I began working on a speech I'll be giving at an Ohio librarian conference next month on readers' advisory in the horror genre. The title is "Twilight, Vampires and the Horror Beyond". To be honest, I'm really excited about this presentation.

In researching the book twilight, I ran across an interview, Stephenie Meyer, gave Time Online where she said she did no research on vampires before she began to write her novel. When I'd heard that many months ago, I was appalled. How could you write a vampire novel and have read Dracula? How could you write about a creature you've never researched?

Think about it for a minute. Most of you have read Stephen King's Salem's Lot, about a small town in Maine that becomes overrun, with terrifying quickness, by vampires. He'd read Dracula as well as many other vampire stories and wondered, what if -- unlike all those other stories -- the vampire plague could not be contained? What if one vampire went to work on a small isolated town unhampered by townsfolk superstition or belief in the supernatural?

Do you think Salem's Lot would have come about without Dracula, Carmilla and so many others showing the way? And, having read those stories, did they not enrich your reading of Salem's Lot?

Then I began to wonder how can I be The Undead Rat and manage a website dedicated to helping you find wonderful new Horror Fiction Books, if I hadn't read all of the classics myself? I've read a fair amount but not all and many books, like Frankenstein and The Invisible Man I read 20 years ago or more when I was in middle school and high school.

The Solution:

Well, that started a spark of an idea that has grown into this project: Classic Horror Fiction Books.

It's a project for me and for you.

It will give me impetus to go back and reread all the classics I'd read a long time ago and pick up new stories I missed.

I plan to look at sources for classics including Project Gutenberg, audio books and eBooks as well as others.

Classic Horror Fiction Books will also give me a place to set down any thoughts I've had about how the past influences the present. I want to explore how the classics enrich reading the horror novels of today. And i want your comments. I want to know your thoughts as well.

C'mon, lets start reading a good classic.